What travellers wrote about Azerbaijan

Al-Masudi & Al-Istakhri

Arab geographers of the classical Islamic world

The earliest written notices of Baku's oil come not from Europe but from Arab geography. Writing in the 10th century, Al-Masudi and Al-Istakhri both recorded the oil lands around Baku and distinguished between the peninsula's white and black oil — a distinction local extractors were already making centuries before the industrial era.

Earlier still, the historian Ahmad al-Baladhuri noted that the economy of the Absheron peninsula rested on oil. Taken together, these accounts show that the fields Marco Polo would describe two or three centuries later were already long-established and commercially organised.

Marco Polo

Venetian merchant and chronicler

In the account of his travels, Marco Polo described a spring near the Caspian that produced oil in such quantity that it was carried away by the camel-load. He recorded that it was not used for food but burned in lamps and applied as a treatment for skin disease in camels — one of the earliest written notices of the Absheron oil seeps that later made Baku famous.

Long before the industrial derricks of the 19th century, the peninsula's oil and gas were already an export and a curiosity written about in Europe.

Jordanus Catalani

French Dominican missionary

Catalani travelled east in the first half of the 14th century as a Catholic missionary. In his notes he recalled Baku and its oil sources — but where merchants saw a commodity, he recorded something else: the healing properties attributed to the oil by the people who lived beside it.

It is a small detail, and easy to pass over. But it is one of the earliest European records of Absheron oil being used as medicine rather than fuel — a folk practice that survived into the modern era at the naphthalan oil spas still operating in Azerbaijan today.

Adam Olearius

German scholar, mathematician and geographer (1599–1671)

Olearius travelled as part of the Holstein embassy to the Safavid court between 1635 and 1639, and he read Russian, Turkish, Arabic and Persian — an unusually well-equipped observer for his century. On the embassy's route he passed through Baku, Derbent, Shamakhi, Javad, Ardabil, Astara and Lankaran, gathering material on the region's history and daily life.

His travelogue became the standard European reference on the region for decades. It was influential enough that when Engelbert Kaempfer set out for the same country nearly fifty years later, he carried Olearius's book with him — and argued with it in the margins.

Evliya Çelebi

Ottoman traveller — author of the Seyahatnâme

Evliya Çelebi spent some forty years travelling the Ottoman world and beyond, and the ten volumes of his Seyahatnâme (“Book of Travels”) are among the great travel works in any language. Reaching Baku in 1647, he examined the oil fields closely and counted seven separate sites around the city.

What makes his account unusual is that he classified the oil by colour — red, yellow and black among them — and recorded which the local market valued most highly. It was the yellow. This is a working trader's observation, not a tourist's, and it tells us the Absheron fields were being graded and priced by type in the 17th century.

Engelbert Kaempfer

German physician and naturalist (1651–1716), secretary to the Swedish embassy

Kaempfer arrived in Shirvan by sea in 1683 and left the Swedish diplomatic party on side-expeditions of his own — to Mount Barmach, the peak known today as Beshbarmag, and to the oil sources of the Absheron peninsula. He is often described as perhaps the first modern scientist to examine the “fields of eternal fire” around Baku.

He visited the city on 6–8 January 1683 and worked with real rigour: the method of oil extraction, the salt workings at Masazir, the escaping flammable gas, the architecture, the economy and the ordinary life of the town all went into his notes. He recorded oil being carried out in wineskins by cart, and by camel and boat across the Caspian.

Kaempfer travelled carrying Olearius's earlier book and was not always impressed by it — he complained that his predecessor's ground plan of Qom resembled the original about as closely as a cow resembles a windmill.

Samuel Gottlieb Gmelin

German naturalist in Russian service

Gmelin travelled the Caspian provinces for the Imperial Academy of Sciences and left one of the earliest scientific descriptions of the fire sites near Baku. His account of devotees performing ascetic practices at the perpetual flames is among the first European records of the religious community that gathered there.

His notes were later cited by the naturalist Karl Eduard von Eichwald, whose own Caucasus journey was published in Stuttgart in 1834.

Friedrich Marschall von Bieberstein

Russo-German botanist and traveller

Bieberstein surveyed the Caucasus as a naturalist at the end of the 18th century, on the eve of the region's industrial transformation. His verdict on the peninsula was blunt:

“the Absheron Peninsula is rich with inexhaustible volumes of oil” — F. M. von Bieberstein, 1796

Within a lifetime he would be proved both right and wrong. The first oil refinery opened in Baku in 1859; by 1867 fifteen were running, and by the turn of the century the city was producing a substantial share of the world's oil.

Alexandre Dumas père

French novelist — author of The Three Musketeers

Dumas spent roughly nine months travelling the Caucasus in 1858, and in November of that year passed through Guba, Shamakhi, Baku and Nukha (today's Sheki). He visited the Ateshgah fire temple at Surakhani, the Caucasian wall at Derbent and the khans' palaces, and he met the Azerbaijani poet Khurshidbanu Natavan, whom he described as among the most educated women of the century.

At Ateshgah he found the community almost gone: by his account only an elderly man and two younger devotees remained, one of whom had arrived from India only months earlier. Of the burning plain itself he wrote of

“a plain nearly a square mile, from which flames burst forth” — Alexandre Dumas, 1858, on the Absheron fire fields

His three volumes of Caucasus impressions were published in Paris the following year.

John Ussher

English traveller

Ussher reached the fire temple on 19 September 1863, recording the name as “Atash Jah”. He noted that the site was still receiving pilgrims from India and Persia — useful evidence that the sanctuary remained a living place of worship into the 1860s, even as Dumas had found its resident community shrinking five years earlier.

Baron Max von Thielmann

German diplomat and travel writer

Visiting in October 1872, Thielmann recorded in his memoirs that the Parsi community of Bombay was maintaining the temple by sending out a priest, who would be relieved after a period of service. His note captures the last organised phase of worship at Ateshgah: the final resident monk died around 1880, and with a refinery operating nearby the natural flames eventually failed.